Posted in: Beep Beep
Posted by: David George-Cosh on April 22, 2009 3:31 PM
Tags:
Abu, Dhabi, du, etisalat, fibre, ftth, hardware, Huawei, infrastructure, internet, IPTV, telecoms, Tilgrin
 du, the UAE's second-largest telcommunications company, has quietly signed a contract with Swedish firm Tilgin to upgrade its Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network infrastructure for roughly US$800,000.
The agreement, which is not listed on du's press release website but is readily available on several industry blogs, will bolster the company's high-definition IPTV offerings when it makes an official commercial rollout of the service sometime in the future.
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Posted in: Beep Beep
Posted by: Tom Gara on April 22, 2009 1:13 PM
Tags:
angel, bayt, incubator, internet, intilaq, venture
 I was out on a meeting yestderday with Dan Stuart, the head of strategy for Bayt.com, the jobs website. We were talking about Intilaq, a new initiative by the company. Intilaq is a very interesting combination of venture capital fund, angel investor and business incubator (expect a story in tomorrow's newspaper). But what really struck me was how big these guys are, in terms of physical presence and staff numbers. I knew they were big, but I never thought they were this big.
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 In today's paper, Tom Gara reported that Etisalat, the UAE's largest telecommunications company, reported its quarterly profits are up 4 per cent compared to the same period last year. The company also said it has added 41,000 new mobile subscribers in the quarter, less than one-fifth of its new subscribers in the year-earlier period. While no company can shake off the effects from the global recession, the subscriber numbers beg the question - have we begun to see real mobile saturation in the country? It may be too soon to tell, but a report released today by US-based telecoms consultancy, ABI Research, may shed some light on how companies like Etisalat can avoid slowing growth.
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Posted in: Beep Beep
Posted by: Tom Gara on April 20, 2009 3:19 PM
Tags:
IPO, qatar, shariah, telecom, vodafone
A group of Islamic scholars have told Qatari investors that subscribing to the IPO of Vodafone Qatar, which will soon break the Middle East's last telecommunications monopoly, does not contravene Shariah law. According to Gulf Times: Subscribing to the shares offered by the Vodafone telecom company will not contradict the Shariah, according to a fatwa jointly issued by Qatar's prominent Islamic scholar Dr Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and six other reputable scholars.
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Posted in: Beep Beep
Posted by: Tom Gara on April 20, 2009 2:17 PM
Tags:
abu, bill, dhabi, dubai, gates, microsoft, qatar, science, technology
Bill Gates, The Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived, has spent the last few days in the UAE. He was treated to, among other things, some quality time with Sheikh Hamdan, the deputy prime minister, an afternoon at Abu Dhabi's Red Bull Air Race (where he was fitted out with a uniform of Team Abu Dhabi, the newest entrant to the contest), and a meeting with Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai. Of course, the local twitterati were ahead of the game on this one, with a number of Gates spottings and general "he's in town" talk coming out well in advance of any reports by us slack-footed media types.
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Posted in: Beep Beep
Posted by: Tom Gara on April 19, 2009 6:54 PM
Tags:
du, fujairah, generation, iphone, next, summit, telecom, zain
You're trying to promote a fairly obscure industry conference. You need your press release to stand out from the gaggle of events getting ready to hit the UAE. You need a press release that will get attention, but have nothing headline-worthy to declare. What do you do? The organisers of the Next Generation Telecom Summit, happening next month in Fujairah, have the answer. Mention the iPhone. In fact don't just mention it - scoop every newspaper, gadget blog, tech website and iPhone lover in the region by announcing that not only have du secured a deal to launch the iPhone, but that their CEO will announce the deal officially at your conference.
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Posted in: Beep Beep
Posted by: Tom Gara on April 19, 2009 4:23 PM
Tags:
arab, arabcrunch, capital, east, entrepreneur, middle, nyt, startup, techcrunch, venture
Gaith Saqer of ArabCrunch, recently featured in The National, has a post up outlining what he thinks needs to happen to create a better scene for tech startups in the Middle East. In the USA, VCs have been the major driving force behind the tech industry, companies like Yahoo and Google would not be here if there was no VC backing, not to mention that most current web startups are VC baked.
So how is the VC scene in the Region?
From my experience I can say VCs in the region are a joke; they are hard to find, and if they do exist they mostly do not invest! However the region is full of wannabe cashless VCs who offer brokering deals and some advice to few investors here and there.
Nonetheless this seen is changing a bit with initiatives like Intilaq from Bayt.com, KuvCapital, ICT (growth VC) and older VCs like EFG-Hermes' Technology Development Fund - but these are not enough.
The New York Times has a article showing the grim state of venture capital investment in the US: Venture capital firms invested only $3 billion in 549 young companies in the first quarter, the lowest investment level since 1997, according to the analysis, done by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The amount invested was down 47 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008 and 61 percent from the first quarter last year.
Though investment in every major technology sector had double-digit declines, investment in clean-technology start-ups, which reached record highs last year, took the steepest dive.
In response, a post at TechCrunch says the major decline in venture capital investment is a permanent industry correction, not the bursting of a short-term bubble: It fell off a cliff in 2001 and 2002 and it's falling off a cliff now. (More on that in a second.) But there's a difference: Funding levels, returns and the percentage of that money going to new ventures never got nearly as high as they did in the 1999-2000 years. So when we talk about steep drops, we're talking about less of a bubble bursting and more of an industry correcting for more than a decade of scale and liquidity issues.
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Posted in: Beep Beep
Posted by: Tom Gara on April 2, 2009 12:12 PM
Tags:
Barcamp, dubai, twitter
The futurist and angel investor Melanie Swan recently visited Dubai. Among her other achievements, she convinced a gaggle of the local twitterati to organise a BarCamp, as we recently reported. She is reflecting on her visit at her blog now, it makes for interesting reading: "What would have to happen to make Dubai and the UAE have a higher probability of being a long-term world-leading society, to shift into being an ideas and innovation-driven economy?
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